In “Born in Evin,” the German actress Maryam Zaree says that she’s tired of playing television clichés of Middle Eastern refugees fleeing from “made-up horrors.” She wants to tell the story of the real horrors that she and her parents fled in the 1980s in Iran, where Zaree was born in the notorious Evin Prison for political dissidents. The problem is she has no memories of that time — and her parents refuse to speak of it.
In her directorial debut, Zaree interviews family, friends, sociologists and psychologists to try to demystify the circumstances of her birth. She doesn’t arrive at clear-cut answers but instead comes to a realization that displaces her from the center of her story.
“You were born into a context that concerns other people, too,” the sociologist Chahla Chafiq gently tells Zaree. Chafiq encourages her to consider the historical and intergenerational scale of her family’s suffering, suggesting Zaree attend an Iranian women’s studies conference in Italy to seek out other survivors of Evin. The women she meets there movingly recount how they would band together to try to care for the children in the prison, who often witnessed the torture of their mothers.
Zaree makes an eloquent and arresting protagonist, though her documentary is a bit too tidy for its own good. Her voice-over imposes epiphanic plot points onto her journey that are reinforced by cheesy visual metaphors, as when she parachutes mysteriously into some scrubland or is shown diving into water in slow motion. These attempts to create a pat structure are at odds with the film’s theme of learning to live with the murky, sometimes irresolvable effects of trauma.
Born in Evin
Not rated. In German, English, French and Farsi, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Rent or buy on iTunes, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
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June 09, 2020 at 06:11PM
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‘Born in Evin’ Review: No Place for a Baby, or Anyone Else - The New York Times
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